Zen in the contemporary marketplace

Abstract

I argue in the following thesis that scholars of Zen should take the presence of Zen related commodities in the marketplace seriously, rather than shunning this presence with respect to discursive parameters that orient scholarly engagements with religious "tradition". I hold that much of scholarly neglect stems from the view that commodification in general is a force injurious to religious tradition. Nevertheless, when we examine closely the material objects that propagate in the marketplace, the line between commodification and religion as discrete categories is blurred. More specifically, "Zen" material objects past and present carry a semiotic and conceptual trace encoded in analogues between them, and individuals' rhetoric in relation to Zen's institutional, doctrinal, narrative and popular contexts is telling of this semiotic and conceptual trace.